


i was neither and i knew nothing

by Anonymous



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Order 66, Suicidal Ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:08:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21801919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The one where a Grand Army marches on the Temple, the few remaining free Jedi are on the run, and things go from bad to worse when word comes of a Jedi marooned on Korriban. Here’s a look at a relationship that we never saw, but that could have been.Or: fathers and sons in the age of the Empire, and all the ways that attachment can wound.
Relationships: Plo Koon & Mace Windu
Comments: 2
Kudos: 68
Collections: Anonymous, Mace Windu Fandom Safe Space





	i was neither and i knew nothing

Palpatine got the GAR to get rid of the Order. He just did it a little more subtly. It’s a rude awakening for the Order when a couple hundred thousand clones come knocking on the front door saying surrender or die. Some of the Jedi die in the initial fight. Lots of them are captured and pressed into service, one Jedi per battalion in the service of the Empire. Follow orders or the padawans get shot. Or there’s always Korriban. Really troublesome Jedi get dumped on Korriban to be driven mad.

There’s some who manage to escape. Mace, Obi-Wan, Anakin, Ahsoka. Yoda is out there somewhere, probably. Most of the Jedi who were offworld at the time. Agricorp, since nobody ever remembers those guys. Lots of new farmers appear out of nowhere. But really it’s those first four we care about. They never learned how to give up a fight. They run around the galaxy trying to save everyone they can, and if they get news from the more sympathetic senators before someone meets a nasty fate, they try and intervene.

When the GAR marches on the Temple, Plo is in the crèche substitute teacher-ing for Lissarkh, who is sick with Wookie flu, go figure. Suffice it to say he does not run, and he becomes the only Councilor not to escape with his charges or die trying. Lissarkh’s younglings sneak out an air vent and help each other down a few elevator shafts, and he covers them until a platoon led by a man with grey paint on his helmet stuns him, two solid shots in his back as he lifts a five-year-old to safety. He falls, and the last thing he says before the shot that knocks him out is _forgive me_.

There’s a few years of shuffling around. The troopers who marched on the Temple start having problems - entire battalions deserting, or their assigned Jedi vanishing on an alarmingly regular basis. Maybe it has something to do with seeing screaming infants and their caretakers desperate to save them. The ones that don’t outright leave or get reconditioned end up on the peripheries of the Empire, technically still in service but easily forgotten.

So back to the gang. They’ve been on the run a while, being thorns in Palpatine’s side, and Satine Kryze gets a message to them about a Jedi who’s being sent to Korriban, only the message arrives late. Korriban is a horrible place. There are a handful of Jedi alive who’ve been marooned there, mostly gone mad, too feral to ever leave, but there are many, many more skeletons picked clean across the landscape. When they find Plo dazed but still present in the drop pod he’d been abandoned in, it’s a relief. Mace finds a shatterpoint and breaks through the viewport, Obi-Wan and Anakin pry open the hatch, and Ahsoka squirms in, pulls Plo’s arm over her shoulder, and drags him out. They scramble onto their ship and leave posthaste.

A few systems after they jump to hyperspace, Plo surfaces enough from his stupor to say _you should have let me die._ Ahsoka is the one to hear him. Her shouting brings everyone else running. Anakin’s never been close to Plo, so he’s mostly upset that Ahsoka’s upset, but Obi-Wan remembers Plo from classes as a youngling, from seminars and missions as a Padawan, from those hopeless days of tea and tears after Qui-Gon passed and he was a new Knight with a new Padawan and no clue what he was doing. Who are we kidding? Obi-Wan is furious too. But he tries, really tries to keep a lid on it because a few hours on Korriban was enough to make him wonder if he wasn’t touched in the head, and Plo had been in that pod for weeks.

But it’s Mace who surprises them all. He unclips his saber and sets it on the table, calmly searches Plo for his weapon (all skin and bones, and it hurts them all to see), and then crouches down beside him, one hand pressed over Plo’s heart.

 _What did you see?_ is a question that none of them want to know the answer to, but Mace asks because Plo needs it to be asked. _Myself,_ Plo says. _I would rather die than allow myself to exist._ On Korriban, the planet had torn into him until he was an extension of its will, another one of the horrors that twisted and carved away at the marooned. He had torn into other minds, the way eased by his natural telepathy, and left warped shells behind.

 _You were in a sealed pod,_ Mace tells him, and _your_ _telepathy doesn’t work that way_ and _you were alone._

None of it helps. Twenty-four hours later, Mace catches him in his first willful act since rescue - trying to bleed himself to death - and he knows Plo is lost to them.

It’s not a conversation that goes well. How could it? Mace wants to send Plo away. Ahsoka is in denial that her dear Master Plo can’t be cured. Anakin can only see the betrayal of it, leaving one of their own to the care of strangers. Obi-Wan - understands, yes, but wishes he didn’t.

 _He will not fight to protect himself_ , Mace tells them. _He may not fight to protect any of us. We can’t keep him when he’s -_

 _Useless?_ Anakin demands. _Is that all you see in him? In us? Our use?_

Mace stills. The anger in him rises, a terrible thing that all of them can feel. In his lap, Plo stills too in his induced sleep, curls inward, trying to make himself small against the incoming wave - and Mace sighs, and the wave dispels.

 _I visited Dorin once,_ he says. _When I was a new Knight. The Sages there cared for a child who wanted to see the galaxy beyond his home. He fit his name, they said. Little explorer. I brought Plo home with me. I had care of his clan in the creche. From the time he came to us to the time Tyvokka made him Padawan, he was my child._

_His clanmates have all passed into the Force. He is the last, and I have had the honor to see him grow and become my peer. I love him still. If he did those things he is afraid he will do, I would love him. I wish him to be well - the way you wish Anakin well, or you Ahsoka. But if I keep him here, I place us all at risk._

_I would die for Master Plo_ , Ahsoka says into the quiet. 

_Is that what he would want?_ Mace asks. He checks Plo’s filters absentmindedly, runs a hand over the new wrapped gash in his arm, tucks his robes around him. The motions are familiar to him, though he has not had opportunity to perform them in many years. _His mind is an open wound,_ he says at last. _And I know myself enough to say that my anger will grate against him and give him pain. I can’t provide what he needs. Could you? Set aside your anger, your grief, be his still point for weeks, months, years? Could you watch him day after day, knowing the moment you take your eyes off him he will try to end himself? Could you forgive yourself if he succeeded?_

 _He is my child,_ he says again. _And I have failed him in every possible way. All I can do for him now is deliver him to the only safety I can find._

There’s a planet covered in sand and clone troopers mostly forgotten by the Empire. They’re not very good clone troopers, see - they’re the deserting kind, and they mostly keep to themselves except for the occasional Jedi they surreptitiously harbor. All Mace knows is they’re led by a man who calls himself Wolffe, and there are hundreds of them. More than enough for a constant guard.

When they arrive, Mace goes to meet the troopers alone. He comes back with Wolffe in tow. When they step into the common area, where Ahsoka is watching Plo pick listlessly at his sleeve, Plo scrambles to his feet, shoving Ahsoka behind him, and Wolffe comes to a halt just inside the doorframe and says _you._ Of all the Jedi he’s met, there’s only one who stands out in his memory.

 _Not Ahsoka,_ Plo says. _You’ve taken Lissarkh’s children already - not Ahsoka too._ His grasp on the Force is weak, his body frail, and he tries anyway to save his last foundling. It’s haunted him for years, what happened to the children he tried to save at the sacking of the Temple. He sees it in his dreams; little Aubyn reaching for him from the vent, silent because he’d told them _you must be_ _,_ her eyes wide in terror as he urges her to run. Aubyn was a willful child, Lissarkh’s pride and pain. It was not in her nature to leave anyone behind, and her clanmates would have followed where she led. 

Wolffe very nearly takes a Judgement to the face. If not for Mace, he would have. From behind Mace’s shoulder, he watches this man he has not seen in years and wonders how he could have become . . . this. How he could possibly make things right with a man he shot and sentenced to agony over a galactic misunderstanding.

 _I’m not here to fight,_ he says quietly. He says almost everything quietly these days. _Master Windu has asked me to extend you shelter for as long as you need._

 _You should have let me die,_ Plo says. _If you were going to give me to him anyway. I just want to die in peace._

 _I’m not here to fight,_ Wolffe repeats. _Just to give you a place to stay. It’s mercy._

What he doesn’t say is he has nightmares about the Temple too. 

Plo laughs brokenly, swaying on his feet. He has eyes only for Wolffe, who is in the armor he remembers, painted teeth on his helmet, a sidearm strapped to his thigh. _What mercy would you extend your enemy when you had none for children? If you had mercy on them, prove it by having mercy on me. Put me out of my misery._

 _Come here,_ Wolffe commands, and Plo shuffles forward. _On your knees,_ Wolffe says, and Plo falls, eyes closed. He craves it, craves his end, so close he can taste it. Punishment for his sins, assurance he will never hurt another again. The barrel of a blaster presses against his forehead. The safety clicks off. So close - and then the bastard speaks.

_This is the one time I’ll agree to this. Listen very carefully - you ask me again, and I’ll do it. But you’re gonna ask me with your eyes open, and the last thing you’re gonna see is your father and all the pain you’re inflicting on him. Because he isn’t going to leave you. You’re going to make him watch you die begging. You’re going to look him in the eye and tell him everything he’s done for you your entire life means nothing. And not just him - your daughter too, and your brothers. Ask me, and I’ll help you make them suffer the rest of their lives._

_Why are you doing this to me?_ Plo asks. 

_Because I’m a Mando and you’re a Jedi_ , says Wolffe. _Because I ruined your life, and this is the only way I can pay you back. Because your buir loves you._

He doesn’t need to ask for Plo’s choice. Plo was doomed from the start. He presses his forehead against the blaster, wishing the price was just a little lower. Wishing it was a price he could pay. A hopeless sob escapes him. 

_What did you do to my children?_ he asks. _After you shot me. Was it quick?_

 _The last I saw of them, they were boarding a ship with a very angry Nautolan, all twenty of them,_ says Wolffe. _Master Fisto swore if we ever crossed paths again, he would avenge you._

They are not on a desert planet for no reason. Kit meant it, and Wolffe believes him.

So Plo stays on his knees, but he doesn’t ask. Mace gathers him close, relief radiating from him, and eventually they stand and walk into Wolffe’s encampment, where there’s a bunk waiting in the barracks and hundreds of troopers watching in shifts and no weapons in sight to tempt Plo, not even a kitchen knife. 

Plo is maybe not the first suicidal Jedi to come their way. He is unlikely to be the last.

But there is a day in the future when Mace comes back, perhaps with other refugees, perhaps looking to rest himself, and Wolffe meets him at the encampment gate in full beskargam, two of his soldiers flanking him, and Mace looks at them and asks _how_ _is he?_

Wolffe tilts his head at the soldier on his right and says _see for yourself,_ and the man pulls off his buy’ce and it’s Plo, alive and well and happy like Mace thought he might never be again. And Plo steps forward, bows, still reserved, still dignified, still himself. He’s still himself. 

He’s still himself.


End file.
